Smithsonian.com

For the Love of Mustard

Across the continents, the market for this crowd-pleasing condiment is booming

No doubt about it  mustard is on a roll. Around the globe, diners
are scarfing it down, in one form or another. (This demand creates
a market for more than 250,000 tons of mustard seed annually; it is
the world's most heavily traded spice.)

And nowhere is the trend more apparent than in the United
States, where we seem to be expanding our mustard horizons. Among
the literally thousands of flavors now on offer are lemon peel,
tarragon, chives, ginger, peppercorn, even chocolate fudge. And
many of those varieties can be tasted or purchased at the epicenter
of American mustard mania  the town of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin,
home to the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. Created in 1992, the museum
showcases more than 3,400 varieties of mustard from more than 40
countries  Italy to Iceland, Belgium to Brazil.

Writer
Joseph Harriss ranged across distance and time to report on the
curious history of and current appetite for mustard. The Greek
dramatist Aristophanes wrote in the fifth century b.c. of
mustard-spiced stews; Pliny the Elder ground mustard seed with
vinegar and used it as a poultice for snakebites and scorpion
stings. In the New World, Thomas Jefferson indulged his Frenchified
tastes by ordering five pounds of mustard seed from Paris and
planting it at Monticello.

France, of course, still produces what purists would consider
classic, unadulterated mustard; a taste for the unusual varieties
has not taken hold there. Very little mustard seed, however, is
actually grown in France; most of the world's supply comes from the
plains of western Canada. And right now those Canadian growers are
looking forward to nothing more than the American baseball season:
when the hotdog vendors are racking up sales, the demand for
mustard  and the price for mustard seed  rise predictably.

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